URGENT Two Thousand Strikers Leave Lenin Shipyard As Strike Ends

URGENT Two Thousand Strikers Leave Lenin Shipyard As Strike Ends

JOHN DANISZEWSKI

Sep. 01, 1988

GDANSK, Poland (AP) _ About 2,000 strikers carrying Solidarity banners and marching behind a cross left the Lenin shipyard today after Solidarity leader Lech Walesa called on them to end their strike.

However, striking coal miners who began the current labor unrest in Poland demanded to meet with Walesa before ending their strikes. The workers were demanding higher wages and legalization of Solidarity.

As the shipyard workers in Gdansk marched toward the St. Brygida's church, a crowd of supporters chanted, ''Thank you, thank you'' and ''There is no freedom without Solidarity.'' The strikers and the crowd sang the national anthem just before the shipyard gates swung open.

''Every Pole is with us today,'' the crowd shouted in unison.

The government welcomed Walesa's appeal to end the strikes, but also announced that a policeman died while on duty inside the strikebound Stalowa Wola steel mill in southeast Poland on Wednesday night.

''It is not known if he was murdered or committed suicide under psychological terror or persecution. I am awaiting results of the investigation, '' government spokesman Jerzy Urban said today.

Solidarity spokesman Piotr Niemczyk in Warsaw said strikers reported that a policeman committed suicide by shooting himself, but had no other details.

In a breakthrough meeting with Walesa on Wednesday, senior government officials promised talks on reinstating the banned free trade union movement and jointly solving the country's daunting social and economic problems.

In exchange, the officials demanded an end to Poland's most serious strike wave in seven years.

Walesa won agreement to end the strikes from workers at the Lenin shipyard and the separate Repair shipyard as well as the Gdansk port after he went to all three facilities to deliver his appeal.

Upon his return to St. Brygida's church from the port, a buoyant Walesa said jokingly, ''More than 100 percent,'' had supported his appeal.

Walesa's meeting with communist authorities Wednesday was his first since they outlawed Solidarity in 1982. Previously, the government had refused to treat him as anything more than a private citizen.

Seven other enterprises in Poland remained on strike today.

Niemczyk said workers at the July Manifesto mine in southern Poland said they would not end their occupation strike until local issues of pay and work conditions are settled and until Walesa visits the mine to explain his appeal.

At the Stalowa Wola steel mill, management refused to give strikers a copy of Walesa's post-meeting statement, delaying a decision to end the strike there, Niemczyk said.

A report on Polish radio at noon said talks between management and strikers at Stalowa Wola started to discuss the ''technical ending of the strike and the departure from the enterprise of people taking part in it.''

In an initial reaction to Walesa's statement, strike leaders in Szczecin, the country's other main Baltic port, said they would not automatically end their strike while local grievances were still pending, he said.

The labor unrest began Aug. 16 at the July Manifesto mine. At its peak, the strike wave has affected 20 enterprises employing about 100,000 workers.

The strikers demanded higher wages and legalization of Solidarity, which was crushed in a Dec. 13, 1981 military crackdown.

After meeting Wednesday with Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak and Stanislaw Ciosek, an alternate member of the communist party's ruling Politburo, Walesa said: ''I raised the presently most important problem of paths leading to trade union pluralism, including Solidarity's place.

''The partners (in the discussion) stated that all problems connected with the union movement would be discussed at the round table,'' he said. ''I have thus decided that we now stop the strike actions.''

Walesa also said the government agreed to discuss broad political and economic issues at the round table, to be convened in the near future.

His statement was sent to strikers nationwide and read to reporters in Gdansk.

The state-run news agency PAP, in a short dispatch on the session, said the parties discussed ''the premises for organizing a 'round-table' meeting and the procedure for holding it.''

After the talks in Warsaw, Walesa went straight to the Lenin shipyard, where he is employed as an electrician, to explain his appeal.

''It is a difficult decision because there are no written guarantees,'' said Walesa aide Piotr Konopka.

Walesa's talks with the officials came on the eighth anniversary of the signing at the Gdansk shipyard of the 1980 accords that for the first time guaranteed free trade union rights in a Soviet bloc country.

Walesa, Kiszczak, Ciosek and Bishop Jerzy Dabrowski of Warsaw met for three hours in a government villa in Warsaw.

Andrzej Stelmachowski, a prominent intellectual trusted by both the authorities and Solidarity, helped arrange Wednesday's meeting.

Afterward, he said it represented the beginning of a process to resolve problems that include 60 percent inflation and the failure of wages to keep pace with increases in government-controlled prices.

Walesa said the talks to bring about ''Solidarity-related union organizations'' would require ''patient negotiations which have to take a certain time.''

The problem of trade unions, the right to form associations, and the role of other groups in the government's reform programs would be the round tables' main subjects, said Stelmachowski.